Nothing is simple for this fellow!

[sovay]

I wish I had some idea how I came to be looking up Charles Baudelaire on Wikipedia, but I consider it a lucky strike of free association: I had never seen a photograph of him before. This one got my attention.



It's credited to Étienne Carjat, c. 1863. I had some idea of what he looked like from paintings, but none of them have that mimetic jolt: you stare in at the subject, he stares out at you. It's weirdly modern, immediate. How often do you see photographs from the 1860's where the subjects have bruises under their eyes? He looks like an accountant who hasn't slept for a month. He's a Decadent poet's hangover. And somehow he looks respectable. Run-down, but not in the aesthetically dissipated way. (fleurdelis28 commented, "I'm not sure I'd ever expected to see a photograph of a person who looked like a cross between Remus Lupin and Calvin Coolidge, but if I had I would not have expected that person to be Baudelaire.") Given, of course, that he was Baudelaire, I bet it annoyed the fuck out of him.

Comments

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

You're right, it is a very arresting photograph. The intensity is startling--I suppose that what I want to say is that I'm amazed that he was able to project like that, over the space of time needed to take a photograph in 1863.

I now have a strange desire to look through photographic portraits from the era, in a concentrated, searching fashion, in order to see if I can find any others with a similar quality to them. I wonder if we might find... not the same intensity and immediacy, but something along the same lines, in an American Civil War photograph, but I find myself thinking that I've seen a fair number of them and don't really recall it.

And I love fleurdelis28's comment; it's absolutely spot on, in all respects.

[sovay]

I wonder if we might find... not the same intensity and immediacy, but something along the same lines, in an American Civil War photograph, but I find myself thinking that I've seen a fair number of them and don't really recall it.

If you run across any, let me know. I am fascinated by the way worlds vanish and seem accessible only in fragments; and then you find something which burns right through to now. Or you don't, and you're left hoping it exists.

And I love fleurdelis28's comment; it's absolutely spot on, in all respects.

She's good like that.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

If you run across any, let me know.

I will.

I am fascinated by the way worlds vanish and seem accessible only in fragments; and then you find something which burns right through to now. Or you don't, and you're left hoping it exists.

Yes.

I... zut, I want to say something that might be profound or might be daft about that, but I can't grasp hold of it, and it's not long before class and I ought to be athinking on other things. Ah, well.